


The Way Back

by oldmythologies



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU (Comics)
Genre: Angst, Family, Gen, catatonic jason
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-12
Updated: 2017-04-12
Packaged: 2018-10-17 23:03:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10604118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oldmythologies/pseuds/oldmythologies
Summary: Something in Jason remembers where home is.





	

He couldn’t breathe. He could feel the air around him, and it didn’t feel like oxygen. It was thick, heavy. Dark. The air was dark. _ What _ ? He sucked in, but it wasn’t working. His lungs inflated, deflated, but it didn’t work. He needed air. Real air.

His arms were crossed in his lap. Weird. Not very comfortable. He lifted one, only to have the motion stopped by something solid. It was so small. He continued to move his arms around, feeling the space. Too small. Much too small. The air got darker, and he tried again, faster, to pull it into his lungs. He opened his eyes and the air wasn’t the only dark he was in. He was in a dark box.

He clawed at the edges of his confinement. It was all solid and all so dark. His not-breathing only quickened. He had to get out, had to get real air. 

He felt the first splinter slipped under his nail in the first few scratches.  _ This is good _ , he knew. It meant that he was getting somewhere. As his hands started picking up speed, the wood frayed. He was clawing into a bed of needles, and they treated his hands like a pin-cushion. He didn’t understand this, this new pain. The boy’s brain wasn’t working right; it took him much too long to realize why freedom was causing him pain. It didn’t matter. He was too afraid, and too far away from air,  _ real air _ , to let that stop him. He didn’t notice when hollow sobs started racking his body, fighting for air, fighting the pain. Each scrape of the fragile protein and flesh against the solid wall above him pulled off another chunk of nail. Soon enough, his fingers had no protection against the rough surface he had created. Worse than that, they weren’t working anymore. The boy felt the drops of warm liquid hitting his face come more frequently and the wood was wet with it. It didn’t help him get through, to find air.

He found the only other solid in the dark, his belt buckle, and continued to scratch. His lungs burned in their emptiness.

And then he got through the solid. He was flooded by wet, heavy, cold. Now in something much worse, he longed for the dark air, but he had to get out. Had to get away from all of the heavy. In this heavy, he didn’t even try to breathe. This was not even air. He had to get away. He pushed through the heavy, dimly realizing that everything hurt, he couldn’t keep going, couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, and then--

He could.

He breathed in huge lungfuls of air, eyes bulging from the head that emerged from the dirt. 

_ Real  _ air.

It was lighter. His lungs, still underground, filled to capacity, contracted, and repeated. They slowly emerged from the dirt, along with the rest of the boy’s body. It was small, with bloody hands, muddy clothes, and wide eyes.

He could breathe. 

_ What else was there to do? _

The boy knelt there, on top of the dirt, in the rain, pondering that very question, for quite a few moments.

He knew that he hurt. He knew that everything hurt a lot. His hands sat in his lap as he stared at them with glazed over, blue-green eyes.  _ Huh _ . That was the liquid that the scratching had made. It was red.

His chest hurt. His head hurt. His muscles ached and his skin felt wrong. But this was all a fact of life for this boy. This agony, these nerves, firing without relent, this is how it was. He didn’t know any different.

And then something else took over. Something animal. Something completely genetic, ingrained, and natural. 

This thing made the boy stand up.  _ One foot in front of the other _ , some voice in his head sang. He took the first shambling step, barely caught himself in time to take the next one. His arms hung limp at his sides, but his head—his head turned up, blank eyes gazing at the moon. He closed those eyes, and if you looked closely, looked behind the mud and blood and pain and tears, you might be able to see something that looked strangely like joy.

He didn’t know where he was going. Maybe he was being led by smell, like a dog. Maybe he was being attracted by the light, like a moth. Maybe there was some instinct inside of him that  _ knew  _ exactly where he needed to be, a bird flying home south. The boy shambled, _ one foot in front of the other, take one step then take another _ , to the place on the top of the hill. It was a big, imposing place. The boy didn’t care, he just kept on walkin’,  _ we’re headed in the right direction _ .

The rain made it difficult,  _ but life’s a journey, no need to hurry _ . He kept going, following the innate knowledge that the big place on the hill was safe.

He didn’t know how long or how far he walked. He barely knew that he was walking at all, but suddenly he was there. Staring at a wall.  _ Huh _ . Well, he made it to the big place on the hill.

He knelt back down, legs finally giving out on him. 

Bruce just couldn’t crack this case. It seemed simple enough, but they always  _ seem  _ simple. They rarely are.

This new variation of Molly plus LSD plus caffeine had been causing deaths left and right, both from overdose and from the violent effects on the user. No one should want to be tripping, hallucinating, and full of energy at the same time. But as the question always was in Gotham,  _ normal cartel or insane person with a super-villain shtick _ ? 

The computer was about to spit out a more detailed chemical makeup of the drug when something started blinking in Bruce’s peripheral vision.

He swiveled his chair to glance at one of the security monitors. The sensors closest to the house had picked up movement. Not that out of the ordinary, occasionally a bird will land near the house, flying over the sensors at the edge of the property. Sometimes the rain will trip them.

Bruce, ever the paranoid bat, checked the cameras anyways.

He stood up with all the speed you would expect from a superhero, his four hundred dollar chair toppling to the ground beside him.

There was  _ person  _ there. He couldn’t see a face, or much of anything in the dark rain, but they were kneeling. Not moving. Facing the wall near one of the back doors. And they hadn’t tripped the perimeter alarm. Bruce’s eyebrows knit together as he hit to communications button on the console in front of him.

The house was asleep, so it took a moment to get open lines as Bruce stared at the figure huddled in the rain.

“ _ B? What’s up? _ ” 

Dick.

“ _ Emergency? _ ”

Tim.

“ _ Yes, Father?” _

Damian.

_ Long-suffering sigh _ .

Alfred.

As soon as the everyone was up, Bruce explained the situation and gave his commands.

“I’m going to investigate, but we still don’t know if our intruder knows our identities. Be prepared, but do not do anything to tip him off. Not yet.”

“ _ Be careful, Master Bruce.” _

He gave his usual grunt of affirmation, put on his gear belt followed by a jacket, and moved over to the elevator, prepared for whatever enemy may face him, be it a particularly intrepid reporter or a new rogue.

Jason hadn’t been there long when a door ( _ oh that’s what that is _ ) opens a few feet away. Instinct tells him to get away from that, when someone is coming, you get away. They’ll hurt you. He scrambles back to look at the new figure as quickly as his broken body allows.

Bruce didn’t know what to expect when he opened the door, but he had a plan ready for every possibility. Every possibility except for this one.

He doesn’t know what he’s looking at. First, he sees the dirt, then the blood, then the gaunt body. Then the eyes.

_ Those eyes _ \-- he knows those eyes. He  _ knows  _ he knows those eyes. He has never seen them so full of pure, unadulterated fear.

Bruce looks at him for a moment, at those eyes.  _ The suit, the dirt, the blood _ .

He doesn’t believe it. He  _ can’t  _ believe it. He buried those eyes years ago. He still has the suit, the red and green and gold one, but he hasn’t thought about those for a long time.

Jason has stopped scrambling. He’s still afraid, but something inside him sees the man in front of him and doesn’t want to run away. He wants the man to save him.  _ Save him from what, _ some voice says. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know how to tell the man he needs to be saved. He doesn’t remember how to.  _ How do I tell him _ , he wonders.

The boys lets out a noise, somewhere between a yell, a sob, and a scream. It opens a floodgate, and suddenly the boy can do nothing but wail. He can express the hurt now, and so he can’t stop.

Bruce wants to be cautious, he really does. He hears the voices in his earpiece, the voices that can hear but not see, reacting to the sudden noise, telling him to be cautious. They ask him if he’s okay, who’s there, what’s happening, but Bruce isn’t listening.

As soon as the first yelp emerges from the boy, Bruce is running. He needs to see if this is his lost soldier, his Robin, and he needs to stop the torment that the boy is obviously suffering through.

When he reaches Jason, the boy falls into the man. Bruce holds him, disbelieving, as he wipes the dirt off of the face in his arms. It’s a bony body with blue-green eyes look up at him with such  _ need  _ as it is racked with sobs and gasping breaths. The rain helps as Bruce tries to clean off his face, confirm his identity.

He uncovers a scar. Hairline to right eyebrow. Exactly where he remembers the boy being scratched by one of Ivy’s vines in his first year out.

The face is right, too. It’s barely recognizable, so devoid of healthy flesh, but the bone structure is there.

It’s Jason. This is Jason, sobbing in his arms, staring up at him with scared, helpless, and unrecognizing blue-green eyes.

He doesn’t listen to any of the noises coming from his comms, too focused on the eyes in front of him, but he responds anyways.

“I,” he sighs, “I don’t,” another sigh, “it’s Jason.”

The comms erupt with white noise as they all clamor for information.

Bruce continues ignoring them and holds the boy even more tightly. They sit together in the rain, one crying, maybe both, wondering what happens next.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this ages ago with the idea of continuing it, but I think I'm finally happy with it. Hope you enjoyed!
> 
> Yell with me on the internet [@oldmythos](http://oldmythos.tumblr.com)


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